[ Download “Design Thinking - One Card Game” DesignThinking.zip – Downloaded 860 times – 102.55 KB

You can download Design Thinking for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download.

Design Thinking is a game about taking, and responding to a brief from a clent, which only requires the single card – and a few commonly found resources for your ‘design team’ – pens, yarn or string, beads and counters. Play it with your learners to sharpen their active listening skills, and as an introduction to an important aspect of Design Thinking.

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You can download Meander for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download.

Meander is a game about Mindful Walking, which only requires the single card – and your imagination and willingness to play. You can play it in two modes. Question mode invites you to use the card and your walk to answer a question of significance for you, whereas Meander mode simply invites you to enjoy the experience of having your attention pulled from one thing to another as you walk.

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The result, I hope, will not only be a whole load more fun than traditional goal planning, but will also be just as, or possibly even more effective, encouraging reflection on what really matters, in terms of skills, allies and resources, to achieve a medium to long term development aspiration, and providing an accurate (although subject to player biases about their own capabilities and effort), measurement of progress towards a valued goal.

More gameplay on the way

This is also just a starting point. This character sheet can be used on its own to track progress, but the logical next step is to link it with other sheets which will evaluate ‘Quests’ (think projects, training or other forms of experience) and allow them to update the characters vital stats and progress.

And because its an RPG style experience it also makes sense to include a ‘Spellbook’. This will contain all those pieces of ‘magic’ that work for you, focusing on aspects such as self-care, life (and work) hacks and learning from books/videos etc.

Finally, (for the moment), I think it will also be possible to create another template which will take information from all the above to create a ‘cv’ type character sheet which will allow you to display your experience and achievements in an easy-to-read format.

So for the moment, here is the Character Sheet, and only in a print format, for filling in with a good old-fashioned pen or pencil. It should be enough for you to do your initial character creation and calculate your current level and experience with regard to that all-important purpose. I’ll be honest, it’ll probably be tough to keep doing the calculations manually, on an ongoing basis, so you’ll probably want the spreadsheet pretty soonish, if the initial try out makes you think you might want to use this long-term.

The fully functioning spreadsheet version will follow in due time, and will be available on itch.io

Formulas for the pen and paper version

You might have noticed that the thing works slightly differently from an RPG character sheet – instead of adding to your stats when you level up, you update your stats, and your level and experience update accordingly. Think of your level as being a progress bar (going from 0 to 20) which shows how close you are to achieving what you want. With the character sheet alone that won’t reflect how close you are to achieving a task or project (you’d need ‘Quests’ for that), but it will show how prepared your character (ie You) is with all they need (skills, allies, equipment) for the tasks and projects you have in mind

With a spreadsheet, you will obviously be able to get much more complex calculations, not to mention fancier outputs, but for the pen and paper exercise, the following calculations will give you a good approximation to see your character’s current level.

Here is a typical D&D levels/experience table.

To discover your current level, simply take an average of all the populated yellow boxes. If you want to see your current XP, use the following formula.

xp of current level + (xp of next level - xp of current level) * (average - current level)

So for example, if the average you calculated was 6.75, you would be Level 6, but you would have achieved 75% (0.75) of the XP needed to get to the next level. This formula would calculate 75% of the difference in XP between Level 6 and 7 and add it to the XP for Level 6.

The spreadsheet will be a deal more complex than this but these simple calculations will give you a good enough idea to test out the concept of this character sheet.

The Quest sheet will follow in quick order, and the Spell sheet should be up and running by end July, early August – also on itch.

Happy Role(Real)playing.

The post The Game of You – Character Sheet first appeared on Ludogogy.

You can download The Gift Horse for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download

The Gift Horse invites you to tune into the animal which has attached itself to you – and find out more about it and yourself.  You can play on your own or with others, and either put aside time for a play session, or make the game a regular practice which fits into your everyday life.

Play by journaling, having conversations or just in your head. The Gift Horse wants to give you an experience just for you, and invites you to become the player, and designer of, an adventure of discovery with your animal avatar.

The game is suitable to be used in learning settings to encourage reflection, maybe on roles within a team, or for reflective coaching. Its eventual applications are limited only by your imagination, as you are free to amend this game, or create your own game based on it.

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The following is Corrado’s post – originally published on LinkedIn which explains more about it.

You can also read Corrado’s other posts in Ludogogy.

The Virtual Collaboration Deck is a deck of 9 double sided cards that could facilitate virtual meetings and create easy communication protocol across all participants.

I don’t want to enter here in the discussion about non-verbal communication, its percentages in people common interaction (30,40,60%…) and how this has been impacted by the current situation where everyone is working alone, only virtually connected with others. It is however out of any doubt that non-verbal communication is really hard to reproduce in pure virtual environments and we, as human, miss this a lot.

That’s why I was exploring different ways to activate it within teams. Cards immediately appeared as a good idea and also as a perfect example of gamification (yes, this is not serious gaming). Moreover cards can provide one more reason to activate video connection  and a fun way interact with the meeting participants without interrupting too abruptly the flow of the conversation. During in person meetings there are plenty of these situation (one for all? nodding with your head when you agree).

The best example of such a deck I have found on the market is the “Supercards” deck from Lisette Sutherland’s “Collaboration Superpowers”  that I strongly suggest to experiment.

The usage of these cards is pretty easy: take the card related to something you want to communicate to the speaker or to the participants and show it on the camera (obviously turned on). Immediately your message is delivered across the meeting without interrupting the speaker. The “raise hand” option in MS-Teams has exactly the same usage, but with these cards you more options.

I’ve used this deck for months (ask my team mates!) and I have identified some different situations/ideas to create my own deck. Here is when the experience as a game designer can be helpful, becasue I designed this deck following the same approach I use for games.

Below the attributes of the CVD deck:

• A deck easy to transfer and print (ideally a 1 page PDF < 1MB)
• Black and white cards (not grey-scale or coloured) to maximise visibility also using awful laptop cameras
• Standard icons, but also a short description in case of different cultures
• Standard paper should be used to minimise reflex
• A Low Ink version easy to Print and Play at home with cheap printers
• Be sure what was the card showing, so need a recall on the back of each card
• Want to optimise the usage of the single page, so moved to a double sided card solution
• Card and recall should avoid confusion (particularly critical in double sided cards)

The card is upside-down to be clearly used front-back (even if in this configuration there is no back or front). This solution seems to be very effective to be used in other games too. You can find all above attributes too.

This version of the deck collect the following collaboration cards.

1. You are on mute; Mute yourself please
2. Cannot hear you; Your voice is disturbed
3. I like this; I don’t like this
4. Awesome; Hello everyone
5. Cannot see the screen; You look frozen
6. Hear some background noise; Thank you
7. Need a break; Must drop off
8. I’ve something to say or ask; Ok for me
9. ELMO (Enough Let’s Move On); Slow down pls

If you like the idea, you can download the deck , use it and provide your feedback in the comments below.

To print them, do a double sided print in portrait mode, flipping on the long edge.

I hope this could help you and your team to move to a better level of collaboration.

NOTE: If you are asking yourself “Why CVD and not VCD?” It is because of the logo. 😉

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It generates ‘briefs’ either by presenting four random cards, or by allowing you to choose cards from a list. These briefs are designed to stimulate ideas and dicscussion around designing games. The cards therefore  present a theme, desired outcomes, learning or games design ideas and theories, and toys or mechanisms.

At the moment this game is set up with a list of themes, which are ‘wicked problems’, such as Climate change.  As the game is implemented as an Excel spreadsheet, the card contents are merely lists in a sheet, referenced by VBA code which allows you to reference specific cards or randomise your choice, turn over cards which have two sides and so on.

Once you have downloaded the game, feel free to amend the lists to suit your purposes, but I wouldn’t recommend playing with the code unless you at least a little VBA (a good opportunity to learn maybe). If you are going to share or demo the game, we would appreciate you referencing Ludogogy – and of course – let us know if any killer game ideas come out of the sessions when you use it. Drop us a line at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Meta Game Download to Create your own Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Download of the Touchstone Template referenced in the article Focus on… Narrative Structures in July’s issue of the Magazine.  A word document containing diagram and questions to create your own story.

The post Touchstone Template Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

Download of the Wagon Wheel Template referenced in the article Focus on… Narrative Structures in July’s issue of the Magazine.  A word document containing diagram and questions to create your own story.

The post Wagon Wheel Template Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

Download of the Hero’s Journey Template referenced in the article Focus on… Narrative Structures in July’s issue of the Magazine.  A word document containing diagram and questions to create your own Hero’s Journey.

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Download of the complete materials for the Ecosystem Game referenced in the article in Aprils’s issue of the Magazine.  A word document containing facilitator instructions, team instructions, role cards for teams and suggestions for debrief questions.

The post Ecosystems Game Materials Download first appeared on Ludogogy.